Thursday, 14 February 2013

A warm fog of acceptable feeling

A thought for Valentine’s Day …

‘That’s how sentimentality works, replacing
particularity with a warm fog of acceptable feeling, the difficult exact stuff
of individual character with the vagueness of convention. Sentimental assertions
are always a form of detachment; they confront the acute, terrible awareness of
individual pain, the sharp particularity of loss or the fierce individuality of
passion with the dulling, “universal” certainty of platitude …

The oversweetened surface of the sentimental
exists in order to protect its maker, as well as the audience, from anger. At
the beautiful image refusing to hold, at the tenderness we bring to the objects
of the world – our eagerness to love, make home, build connection, trust the
other – how all of that’s so readily swept away. Sentimental images of children
and of animals, soppy representations of love - they are fuelled, in truth, by
their opposites, by a terrible human rage that nothing stays. The greeting card
verse, the airbrushed rainbow, the sweet puppy face on the fleecy pink
sweatshirt – these images do not honour the world as it is, in its complexity
and individuality, but distort things in apparent service of a warm embrace …
in this way, the sentimental represents a rage against individuality, the
singular, the irreplaceable.’

About Me

I am a writer and academic, based at Liverpool John Moores University. I have written five books, the most recent of which are Queuing for Beginners (2007), a cultural history of daily habits since the war, inspired in part by the Mass-Observation surveys of the 1930s and 1940s, and On Roads: A Hidden History (2009). As well as publishing articles in obscure academic journals, I write for the Guardian, the New Statesman, the Financial Times and other publications. I am a cultural historian focusing on the very recent past, with a particular interest in the everyday. To email me, click on 'view my complete profile' below. You can follow me on Twitter at
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